Acer Revo 100 hands-on

The streaming boxes market is starting to heat up with Apple TV, Boxee Box, and others all starting to fight to turn your TV into something considerably more intelligent than it probably is at the moment.

The latest contender is the Acer Revo 100 a full blown PC in a small virtually silent box that promises a prettier interface that Windows 7 but all the power.

Standing either vertical or laid on its side it’s slim, virtually noiseness and looks for all intense purposes like a super slimmed down even slimmer slim PlayStation 2.

Featured on the Revo 100 is Acer clear.fi, an application that runs on your home network that automatically discovers all your household devices and then letting you find, share, play, store and enjoy all your multimedia content anywhere in your home in an easy, intuitive and innovative way and our quick hands-on in the office (full review coming shortly) tells that it’s fairly simply to run and managed.

But if there is one thing that stands out about the Acer Revo 100 is the natty remote control that is a slab of plastic.

Both your mouse and your keyboard it can change between the two at a touch of a button with the keyboard appearing and disappearing as it does.

Concealed within its lean body it’s official name is the RevoPad, a dual-mode wireless touchpad. Press the toggle button to transform the RevoPad into a touch keyboard to easily type any amount of text with your fingers. Another tap on the toggle button and you have a multi-gesture large touchpad that lets you move the curser and then browse, rotate and zoom in/out with intuitive finger movements.

It’s very clever and very easy to use.

The Acer Revo 100 is powered by AMD Athlon II Neo dual-core processor and features next-generation NVIDIA ION graphics solution for a premium 1080P full HD performance. The Acer Revo 100 is configurable with an internal TV tuner as well as a choice of either a DVD burner or a BD Combo optical drive. The BD Combo option provides full 1080P 3D playback when connected to any 3D enabled HDMI display. It supports up to 4 GB of DDR3 memory and large storage with up to 750GB of capacity. For even greater flexibility, Acer Revo 100 is equipped with 3 USB ports and a multi-in-one card reader, wireless and wired LAN and is preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit operating system enabling all traditional PC usage.

Stuart has been a tech journalist since 1998 and written for a number of publications around the world. Regularly turning up on television, radio and in newspapers, Stuart has played with virtually every gadget available.